Section: Punishment and Consumption of Slaves

In New Zealand, cannibalism occurred most often in the context of war. Dead enemies were eaten, and captives were often killed for this purpose.5 A detailed analysis of Maori cannibalism, with a focus on war cannibalism, can be found in Paul Moon’s book This Horrid Practice.

There are also reports of war parties killing and eating random people (unrelated to either of the warring parties) they just happened to encounter—acts explained as due to food scarcity on the march.6 The ethnologist S. Percy Smith (1840–1922) collected various accounts of war campaigns told by participants. In several cases, the killing and consumption of women and girls spotted during travel is mentioned; convenience and a desire for food, rather than a preexisting hostility, seem to have been the motives.7

Most of the reports of war cannibalism are from a period known as “Musket Wars” (ca. 1807–1837), when warfare between Maori groups had become more intense and deadly because of the acquisition of muskets from European traders. Smith recorded a song cursing the “stranger from afar” who brought the “strange and powerful weapons, / That felled the mighty of this land.”8

Captured enemies were either killed or enslaved; Maori warriors considered proposals to release them as stupid, arguing that they would only seek revenge at a later date.9 Men were usually butchered and eaten. While many women and children met the same fate—women were often raped before being murdered, and European observers saw children of various ages spit-roasted whole over open fires—others were kept alive as slaves.10 The Scottish surgeon and historian Arthur S. Thomson (1816–1860) notes that any captives not immediately killed were distributed among the victorious fighters. While slaves were usually captured in war, they were also objects of trade—they could be bought and sold—and sometimes they changed owners when a compensation for an injury was required. Their children became enslaved as well, at least if both parents had this status.11

The British artist Augustus Earle (ca. 1793–1838) once observed the return of a successful war party, which arrived by canoe with “quantities of plunder, human heads, human flesh, and many prisoners.” The latter were “miserable creatures, women and children, torn by violence from their native homes, henceforth to be the slaves of their conquerors; some were miserably wounded and lacerated, others looked half-starved, but all seemed wretched and dejected.” When Earle asked, “what they had done with the male prisoners,” one of the warriors “coolly replied, they had all been eaten, except some ‘titbits,’ which had been packed up in the baskets and brought on shore, in order to regale particular friends and favourites!”12

While captives kept as slaves escaped immediate death, they were not always allowed to reach old age. The British merchant Joel Samuel Polack (1807–1882), who settled in the north of New Zealand in 1831 and spent the larger part of the next twenty years in the country, writes: “The victor or master has full power over the life and body of his servant.” He adds that “slaves are liable to be put to death on the slightest fault committed by themselves . . . or at the caprice of their masters, in which case they are cut down, immediately dressed, cooked and devoured.”13 Thomson and the English-Australian missionary Samuel Marsden (1765–1838) agree that masters were free to kill their slaves if it pleased them to do so14 and the politician and anthropologist Te Rangi Hiroa (1877–1951), son of a Maori mother and a white father, observes that slaves “were usually treated with kindness but . . . liable to be drawn upon to supplement the food supply.”15 The American anthropologist Andrew P. Vayda likewise notes that slaves were “liable to be killed in order to serve as a human sacrifice or as the relish in a feast.”16

Polack reports of two female slaves who suffered this fate near his residence. Shortly after his arrival, a chief17 named Te Táwoa ordered a “slave to prepare some . . . sweet potatoes” before starting for a “shooting excursion.” He stayed away longer than expected; the food got cold and finally the woman ate it herself. She might have considered herself safe because she was his sexual consort, but when Táwoa returned and heard what happened, he “called the hapless woman to him, and without speaking a word, dispatched her with a blow on the forehead with a tomahawk.” He invited all his friends, and “the body . . . was dressed, cooked, and on their arrival eaten.” Polack heard of this feast from one of the participants, who assured him that the body had been completely consumed.18

The other case, Polack learned of from a European trader named Anscow who had been traveling along a nearby river, accompanied by a native crew, and attempting to sell “blankets, powder, and tomahawks.” One evening, when he settled in a village for the night, an enslaved girl arrived, aged around fifteen and “remarkably handsome.” Upon seeing her, an old woman started to loudly revile the girl, who apparently had been gone for two days “without leave.” The woman then asked a man who stood nearby “to kill the girl immediately.” Without hesitation, the man went to Anscow’s boat, “and seizing one of the tomahawks, which had been brought for barter, he struck the miserable girl a blow on the forehead with the implement that cleft her head in twain.” Anscow thought that he might have been able to purchase the girl “for a musket,” thus saving her life, but events unfolded so quickly that he did not have time to intervene.19 So he watched while the body was

decollated, opened, and the entrails washed and placed in a basket, the limbs cut in pieces at the different joints, attended with circumstances at once horribly disgusting and obscene. The head was thrown to the children as a plaything, and these little miscreants rolled it to and fro, like a ball, thrusting small sticks up the nose, in the mouth, ears, &c. and latterly scooped out the eyes.20

Meanwhile, the flesh was washed in the river, “the ovens were heated, some vegetables scraped, and the whole was cooked in a half hour.” Some of the flesh was offered to Anscow, “and he was derided for his refusal.” Early the next morning, he attempted to leave, no longer caring for the hogs which the villagers had promised him in return for his trade goods. Instead, he packed his goods, including the tomahawk which had been used for the murder. But before he could leave, three villagers entered the boat, bringing with them “the remnants left uneaten of the cooked body, done up in some small baskets, as a present to be conveyed to their friends.” Ignoring his protests, they accompanied him during the next part of his trip, until reaching another village where they “landed and carried the food to their friends.” Anscow, too shocked to continue his journey, returned to the settlement from which he had started, there meeting Polack and telling him what he had witnessed.21

Other visitors had similar experiences. A few years earlier, Augustus Earle had spent nearly a year in New Zealand. He arrived on a ship that anchored near a village in which an English couple, Mr. and Mrs. Butler, had opened a trading post. Taking a “stroll through the village,” he soon came around “the remains of a human body which had been roasted, and a number of hogs and dogs were snarling and feasting upon it!” Having already heard of local customs, he was “more shocked than surprised,” but he went to Mr. Butler and asked him what had happened. The latter told him that a chief had ordered one of his slave boys “to watch a piece of ground planted with the koomera, or sweet potato, in order to prevent the hogs committing depredations upon it.” But the “poor lad” had been distracted by the sight of Earle’s ship arriving, ignoring the hogs which “soon made dreadful havoc.” When his master saw this, “he instantly killed the unfortunate boy with a blow on the head from his stone hatchet. Then ordered a fire to be made, and the body to be dragged to it, where it was roasted and consumed.”22

Later Earle settled for some time in a village in the Bay of Islands (near the northernmost tip of New Zealand and not far from where Polack would later stay) which “belonged to a [young] chief named Atoi.”23 While there Earle employed a local girl, aged about sixteen, for “carrying wood.” When Atoi paid a visit, “he recognised [the] girl whom he said was a slave that had run away from him; he immediately seized hold of her” and some of his companions took her away. Earle did not make much of the incident at that time, but the next morning another European settler, Captain Duke, told him “that in the adjoining village a female slave . . . had been put to death, and that the people were at that very time preparing her flesh for cooking.” Earle was dismayed when he realized that the victim might have been the girl who had been taken from him.24

Immediately they went to the village, where they spotted “a man preparing a native oven. . . . A hole is made in the ground, and hot stones are put within it, and then all is covered up close.” Nearby stood a laughing boy, who, upon seeing the Europeans, “pointed towards a bush.” In the bush, Earle “discovered a human head,” and, to his “horror,” he “recognized the features of the unfortunate girl I had seen forced from our village the preceding evening!” Near the oven, they met another man “preparing the four quarters of a human body for a feast; the large bones, having been taken out, were thrown aside, and the flesh being compressed, he was in the act of forcing it into the oven.” The man did not seem nervous or embarrassed at being spotted by the Europeans; instead, he calmly told them “that the repast would not be ready for some hours!”25

Knowing that Atoi must have ordered this feast, they walked over to his house, “determining to charge [him] with his brutality.” Arriving there, Earle “shuddered at beholding the unusual quantity of potatoes his slaves were preparing” for the meal. After initially claiming “that it was only a meal for his slaves,” Atoi finally admitted that he would join in the cannibal meal, adding that such feasts were usually hidden from Europeans, who were known to react to them with “horror.” But since secrecy had not worked, he promised to talk freely. Asked why the girl had had to die, “he replied, that running away from him . . . was her only crime.” He showed them “the post to which she had been tied,” explaining with a laugh that he had told her she would merely be flogged, but once she was secured to the post, he “shot her through the heart.” Earle could hardly recognize the man whom he had known as “mild and genteel in his demeanour.”26

Duke and Earle left him and returned to the oven where the girl’s remains were roasting. They decided “to spoil this intended feast” and Earle went to call several other white men who stayed nearby, asking them to help.27 Meanwhile, Atoi arrived with several companions, but they dared not stop the Europeans:

We . . . dug a tolerably deep grave; then we resolutely attacked the oven. On removing the earth and leaves, the shocking spectacle was presented to our view,—the four quarters of a human body half roasted. . . . We collected all the parts we could recognise; the heart was placed separately, we supposed, as a savoury morsel for the chief himself. We placed the whole in the grave, which we filled up as well as we could, and then broke and scattered the oven.28

Afterwards, Earle felt proud of himself and his companions: “Six unarmed men, quite unprotected, . . . had attacked and destroyed all the preparations of the natives for what they consider a national feast,” he writes, and yet, “no harm” had come to them. “It plainly shows the influence ‘the white men’ have already obtained,” he concludes. But the next day, “King George,” or Shulitea—a powerful regional chief and older relative of Atoi—appeared and dampened his elation. “You did a foolish thing, which might have cost you your lives,” he challenged the Europeans, adding that they had accomplished nothing: after they left, the flesh was dug up again “and every bit was eaten”—a statement which Earle later verified, finding the grave empty.29

The self-styled king also disputed the Europeans’ right to interfere in local traditions, and he forced them to admit that their own customs were not all that different: “‘What punishment have you in England for thieves and runaways?’ We answered, ‘After trial, flogging or hanging.’—‘Then,’ he replied, ‘the only difference in our laws is, you flog and hang, but we shoot and eat.’”30 Shulitea then explained he had grown up before the introduction of pigs and potatoes31 in an inland district where fish was unavailable, so “the only food they then had, consisted of fern roots and kumera [sweet potatoes] . . . ; and the only flesh he then partook of was human.”32

But Earle does not want to write about his tales and justifications: “I will no longer dwell on this humiliating subject,” he decides instead. He accepts, however, Shulitea’s suggestion that an absence of other meats was the ultimate reason for cannibalism, adding that “nothing will cure the natives of this dreadful propensity but the introduction of many varieties of animals, both wild and tame.” Earlier, however, he had mentioned that Atoi had sold four pigs to the Europeans the same evening he took the enslaved girl away to her death, observing that “he had not even the excuse of want of food.”33

Admittedly, the continuation of a custom might be due to reasons other than those on which it was founded—we will later return to the question of motives and rationales. In the cases reported by Polack and Earle, the killings were always justified by some slight misbehavior of the slave: they had eaten food meant for their master, neglected their duties, left without permission, or tried to run away. Other witnesses describe similar incidents: for example, the Anglican missionary Henry Williams reports that in 1823 an enslaved woman “from Rangihoua, in the Bay of Islands, was killed and eaten for stealing potatoes.”34 These cases also have another thing in common: nearly always, the victim was a woman or a teenage (or possibly younger) girl or boy.

One exception where the victim was a man was recorded by Polack, who once tried to “purchase some hog’s lard . . . for a lamp.” He was about to buy a “calabash [of] adipose matter,” when his young servant told him that it was “man fat.” After closer inspection, he was sure that the substance was “neither the fat of dog, pig, nor bird.” When he asked the vendor, the latter promptly told him: “It was the fat of a native man—of a slave,” further explaining that the man had been executed for “adulterous intercourse with native women” and that his “body had been devoured.”35 Adultery, especially as it seems to have involved several wives of possibly important men, was apparently a sufficiently severe crime to justify the execution of an adult man—but in general they seem to have had a much better chance of being spared than female and juvenile slaves.

Richard A. Cruise, a captain of the British Army, who in early 1820 arrived in the Bay of Islands36 (where Earle would stay a few years later) and spent the rest of the year in its surroundings, felt that reproaches raised against enslaved women were little more than pretexts for feasts of human flesh. “Instances occurred during our residence among them, and under the eyes of Europeans, of female slaves having been murdered for crimes too trifling to justify such severity,” followed by the immediate cutting up, washing, and consumption of their bodies. The last act, he notes, usually took place out of the view of the Europeans—he knew only one sailor who had “witnessed the act of cannibalism” itself, but various missionaries who had seen its “immediate prelude.”37

One specific case he mentions took place in the Bay of Plenty (in the east of the North Island). An enslaved woman had cursed her master for mistreating her. Immediately, and right in front of the house of a European settler, “he walked up to her, and with one blow of his mearée (or club) laid her dead at his feet.” The body was then taken to a nearby “pool of fresh water” where “the entrails were taken out, it was divided into quarters, and washed perfectly clean. The chief [her master] then threw it into a canoe, and, with some of his tribe, crossed over to a neighbouring island to devour it.” Several missionaries witnessed these events and later told Cruise about them.38